How to create a consistent brand experience across multiple platforms
Before I give you 5 ways to create a consistent brand experience, let’s start with why brand consistency is important for your business.
Why is brand consistency important for your business?
When you advertise your business online or in print, there are often a few things you want to achieve. One goal is likely to be get more business and another might be spread awareness of services.
(Your website and social media channels are always advertising your business)
It can take as many as 7 times (and sometimes more) of someone seeing your content for them to decide to invest in your services. When they are able to recognise that the content is from you, it adds to their ‘touchpoints’ (aka places they’ve seen your business content).
Consistent = expected, recognisable, trustworthy, reliable
There are several benefits to being consistent with your branding – when you look and feel as someone expects it builds trust and can lead to long term clients and customers. On the flip side, there are some negatives to not being consistent.
Inconsistent = unknown, unrecognisable, unexpected
Consistency is key to avoid these negatives and to ensure you appear reliable and trustworthy to potential and existing clients and customers.
Hey 👋 I’m Amy, Founder and Lead Designer of Bloom Creative. I help businesses to enhance their brand so that they are recognised, remembered, and stand out.
5 ways you can create a consistent brand experience
#1 Know your brand colours and fonts, and stick to them
The simplest and most effective way to keep consistency between all of your online platforms and offline materials, is to know your brand colours and fonts and stick to them!
Colours
Whether you have 1, 2, 5, or 7 brand colours, stick to them and stay consistent. That might look like using your main colour the most, and complementing it with your additional colours when needed. For the most consistency, always use the same HEX colour value when creating online content and the same CMYK values for print. You can still be creative whilst sticking to your brand colour palette!
Fonts
Do you have a brand font, or fonts? If you don’t have set fonts and tend to change them up from time to time, consider choosing one or two that best suit your brand and stick to them. This will go miles towards helping your business look consistent!
Top tip: before adding brand-coloured text over a brand-coloured background, check that it contrasts well enough for it to be accessible to read. You can use an online tool like this one by WebAim.
#2 Use your logo consistently
You might have a main colour logo and a logo in a single colour such as white, and you possibly even have an additional logo variation that’s just an icon with no words. These are all great options to have and each variation will suit different places and platforms best.
The dos and don’ts of using your logo:
Do – use high quality, transparent PNGs or vectors whenever you use your logo
Don’t – use JPEGs that are of low quality and/or are in a white box, especially on a coloured background
Do – decide which logo you will use for different platforms and where you will place your logo and stick to it
Don’t – make it up as you go by choosing a logo ‘in the moment’ and placing it wherever you fancy when designing a poster or cover photo, for example
Top tip: gather your high-quality logo files together in one place and delete all of your low-quality ones.
This way you’ll only ever select the best quality logo to use.
#3 Create brand guidelines
A set of brand guidelines is a document that covers the dos and don’ts of your brand. As well as including colours, fonts, and logo placement, which I’ve mentioned above, brand guidelines also include tone of voice, use of imagery, icons, and how to apply your brand assets across a range of platforms. It’s a great resource to have to refer back to when you’re creating something new (e.g. social media posts) and it’s perfect for sending to design and marketing professionals who you outsource work to.
How do you get brand guidelines?
You can write your own. Carve out some time to consider all aspects of your brand, and research through blogs, articles, and videos to discover everything you need to include, then put it all together in one brand guideline document.
Invest in an expert to create your brand guidelines. Some designers (like me!) offer a range of brand services including brand guidelines. They’ll work with you to create a set of guidelines that is unique to your business and covers everything you need it to include.
Top tip: if you already have brand guidelines, but you haven’t read them in a while, go back over them and familiarise yourself with them whenever you’re creating, designing, or writing something for your business!
#4 Save time & be more consistent with branded templates
Sometimes when business (and life) is busy, you don’t have time to pretty up your content and ensure it’s all on-brand before posting. This is especially true if you’re always creating from scratch.
The solution? Branded templates!
A brilliant use of branded templates is for testimonial posts. Create a template so that whenever you share a testimonial, all you need to do is copy and paste the words into the template.
Templates are great for a whole range of things. For social media posts, you can create templates for your ‘top tips’, ‘behind the scenes’, ‘FAQs’, ‘meet the team’ posts and so many more. Outside of social media, you can create templates for proposals, reports, invoices, etc.
Top tip: you can use software like Canva to create your own templates which means you can always easily access them on your phone or your computer. Or you can save yourself time and hire a designer to create templates for you.
#5 Get started with a brand audit
Now you’ve got some tips for how to be consistent, where do you begin? I recommend starting with a brand audit, which is a fancy way of saying ‘look at everything you’ve got and consider what you need to change’.
Start by making a list of everywhere your business appears, both on and offline. This could include social media, website, a feature on someone else’s website, a membership/community platform, freelance job sites, business card, posters, flyers, banners.
Now it’s time to look at some areas in detail. Next to each item on the list, make notes about the visual appearance: colours, fonts, logos, any assets or icons you’ve used. Now revisit tips 1-4 and make a plan of action. What do you need to change or update? What guidelines will you set? Where can templates help you?
If you think a bigger audit or an expert’s insight is what you need, you can hire a designer to conduct a brand audit for you.
If you’ve found these 5 tips helpful, I’d love to hear from you! And if you’ve read this blog and wondered if you need to update your branding with a refresh of your logo, colour palettes and fonts, I’ve written a helpful guide that covers 5 ways to know if your brand needs a refresh as well as the how, the when, and the what now.
